Valuetainment - August 19, 2025


“Still Hanging Around” - Michael Wolff SHARES Epstein’s FINAL Cryptic Message Before His Death

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Jeffrey Epstein Stephen Hoffberg Karina Shuliak Mark Epstein Ghislaine Nicholas
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Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

163.11

Word count

1,331

Sentence count

86

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Jeffrey Epstein's brother, Mark Epstein, joins us to talk about the Epstein scandal and how it led to Jeffrey Epstein being charged with conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and conspiracy to wire millions of dollars.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Did you guys talk about how he makes money?
00:00:02.080 I mean, how he originally made his money?
00:00:04.420 Yes, we did, and that's always, you know,
00:00:07.840 I think that that's one of those aspects of his life
00:00:12.920 that was very compartmentalized.
00:00:15.240 I mean, I've had this discussion with him,
00:00:17.180 but do not feel that I, I certainly didn't feel
00:00:22.720 that I was getting the whole story, quite the opposite.
00:00:26.840 It was rather, he kind of teased you with the story.
00:00:33.100 You know, I mean, he told me once, he said,
00:00:37.620 when I pressed him, you know, and I said,
00:00:39.920 okay, tell me, come on, where does the dough come from?
00:00:45.100 I mean, I've seen him, you know, in many instances,
00:00:49.780 I never saw him, however, do a lick of work.
00:00:53.080 So what was going on?
00:00:55.360 Where did this come from?
00:00:56.360 And he said, and I remember he said,
00:00:58.060 again, in a very, in a very teasy kind of way,
00:01:02.220 he said, well, I run something like a reverse Ponzi scheme.
00:01:07.620 In a real Ponzi scheme, you make money that does not exist,
00:01:14.760 appear to exist.
00:01:16.080 In my Ponzi scheme, I make money that exists,
00:01:20.660 appear not to exist.
00:01:22.500 And the example was, if you're a wealth, very wealthy person and getting a divorce,
00:01:31.320 and if you hide a hundred million dollars or at least make a hundred million dollars,
00:01:36.060 if your wealth disappear, you've just made, saved 50 million dollars.
00:01:40.140 Yeah, there was a guy that Mark Epstein told me that was Epstein's mentor.
00:01:45.440 I don't remember the gentleman's name.
00:01:47.100 He went away and he was in the, Stephen, what's his name?
00:01:51.700 Stephen Hoffberg?
00:01:52.840 He's Stephen.
00:01:53.400 Yes.
00:01:54.120 Hoffberg?
00:01:54.680 I don't know if you know about, okay, yeah.
00:01:56.280 I do.
00:01:56.940 Did that name ever come up or no, between the two of you?
00:02:00.440 You know, it came up in the,
00:02:03.360 Hoffberg, who Epstein had been involved with,
00:02:09.200 and Hoffberg had an insurance company that collapsed.
00:02:12.540 Um, and, um, and Hoffberg went to jail for, for a long time.
00:02:18.400 Like, I, I don't, like 15 years.
00:02:21.180 Um, and then he got out of jail and he started to press Epstein, um, for what I, I don't exactly know.
00:02:31.880 Um, but, but it was, that was something I was aware of going on in the, in the background.
00:02:39.460 Um, um, now Mark Epstein, just by the way, you know, had also not been really his relationship
00:02:49.380 with his brother had, had been, was at best strained for quite a number of years.
00:02:56.560 He said that as well.
00:02:57.580 He said that as well, that they were not as close.
00:03:00.120 I said, you guys live a few minutes with each other.
00:03:02.020 How often you guys have dinner or lunch together?
00:03:03.620 Not that often.
00:03:04.420 Maybe once every couple of years.
00:03:05.380 I'm like, you're a few minutes away.
00:03:06.620 So that, that was a very interesting dynamic as well.
00:03:09.720 The relationship between the two.
00:03:10.780 No, my, in my understanding of, of that, and I don't have a complete understanding because,
00:03:16.260 I mean, that was not something that Epstein seemed to want to talk about, um, was that
00:03:22.120 his brother distance after Epstein's legal difficulties beginning in 2004, his brother, like Ghislaine,
00:03:30.740 distance himself from, uh, uh, uh, from, uh, Jeffrey Epstein.
00:03:37.180 So two people who he contacted last before he passed away.
00:03:41.560 One of them was his German girlfriend who was Karina.
00:03:44.460 She was not German.
00:03:45.960 She was, um, from, as I understand, um, and I mean, I had met her a few times from Belarus.
00:03:53.780 She was from Belarus.
00:03:55.280 I, we got to get this right.
00:03:56.380 Cause you know, the guys, her name is Karina Shulak, Karina Shulak, Belarus.
00:04:02.820 Okay.
00:04:03.100 So from Belarus.
00:04:03.820 And I said, German, forgive me to all the people from Belarus.
00:04:06.580 I didn't want to offend you.
00:04:07.940 So, uh, uh, so, so she, he calls her last one, but he texts you last.
00:04:15.160 What were the last text exchanges with him?
00:04:17.880 And exactly how much longer after his last text to you did he die?
00:04:21.880 Yeah, you know, I think that he, I mean, and he, it was not a text really.
00:04:27.080 It was, it came through his lawyers.
00:04:28.720 So he couldn't text.
00:04:30.180 He was given, they had gotten him the, um, clearance to call the girlfriend.
00:04:38.400 Um, um, but my, my, the message to me had come through one of the lawyers.
00:04:45.000 I mean, I knew the lawyers and I passed them a message.
00:04:47.880 I said, you know, I mean, just, and the message that I sent to him was, you know,
00:04:51.880 uh, you know, how are you doing?
00:04:53.940 Or, you know, just that kind of, that kind of thing.
00:04:57.980 And, and his response to that message was, um, and let's, the context of this is that's
00:05:05.020 about a week before he had apparently tried to hang himself or that's what people said,
00:05:13.220 or again, a confusing situation.
00:05:16.280 But his response to me was, quote, still hanging around.
00:05:22.120 So how are you still hanging around?
00:05:25.220 And then X number of hours later, I mean, this was on Friday, early on Saturday morning,
00:05:31.520 he was, um, um, found, uh, you know, with a bed sheet around his neck in his cell.
00:05:38.840 Well, that's a weird text.
00:05:40.700 So, so the lawyer sends you a text of his last message saying still hanging around.
00:05:44.640 Maybe he was hanging around, meaning the lawyer saying he's dying.
00:05:50.160 So the lawyer told you still hanging around.
00:05:52.500 That could be a cryptic message.
00:05:53.840 Well, I mean, I, I don't know.
00:05:57.280 I mean, it is a cryptic message, but you know, it is, I, I mean, in, in my understanding
00:06:03.400 of, of Epstein and how he responded to things, he was responding to that the, the, the, the
00:06:11.280 news coverage of that he had apparently tried to hang himself, but then they actually said
00:06:17.400 he hadn't tried, uh, there was a, there was a dispute about that.
00:06:22.140 And that was his reference to make a joke out of that, which would have been very Jeffrey
00:06:28.240 Epstein-ish.
00:06:29.980 Did, did Nicholas, uh, uh, Tortagliano ever come up the, the, his, uh, cellmate, the guy
00:06:34.960 that, you know, multiple times beat up, uh, uh, uh, uh, the same person on four different
00:06:40.020 occasions.
00:06:40.360 Didn't come up, didn't not come up with, with me.
00:06:42.920 I mean, those are the community.
00:06:44.000 That's the only communication I would have had with, with, um, or direct communication.
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